Self-Love: The Authentic Path to Conscious Leadership

By Nerisha Maharaj

What is the Secret to Conscious Leadership and Self-Mastery?

Self-love is a topic that many of us seek to avoid--yet it is one which has a profound impact on our happiness, effectiveness and spiritual growth as human beings. What is less well known, is how self-love influences leadership ability. Based on her award-winning published MBA research and drawing on her professional experience in the fields of coaching, business strategy and yoga and meditation, Nerisha Maharaj describes how self-love impacts our ability to lead both ourselves and others successfully--sharing direct inspiring insights from her interviews with leaders and leadership experts. Her MBA research entitled The Power of Self-Love in the Evolution of Leadership was published in a prestigious European peer-reviewed academic management journal, winning a publication award.
In the book, she discusses:
• The meaning of self-love in its highest expression;
• How self-love does not equate to narcissism and selfishness;
• The impact of self-love on leadership attributes such as authencity and decision-making;
• The Five Constructs of Self-Love; and
• Practical coaching techniques on cultivating healthy levels of self-love.
This book highlights, for both established and emerging leaders, the critical role which self-love plays in our overall well-being, values-based leadership and ultimate productivity. Leadership encompasses not just corporate executives, but academics, parents, teachers, coaches, community leaders, political leaders, spiritual leaders, and just about anybody who chooses to lead both themselves and others to greater levels of growth and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483583112

Book preview

Self-Love: The Authentic Path to Conscious Leadership

Published by Anahata Wisdom Press

PO Box 174, Ilala Estate, Durban, 4021, South Africa

www.nerishamaharaj.com

[e-mail]

Copyright © Nerisha Maharaj 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-1-4835831-1-2

Layout and cover design by Boutique Books

Cover art is an oil painting by the author,

which was based on an original by Janis Marashlian,

titled Enlightenment

To That which is Self

And That which is Love

Which, when known,

Dissolves Self into Love

which is

The Essence of us all

Acknowledgements

It is with heartfelt gratitude that I express my appreciation to everyone who has contributed to this work in some way.

To you, dear readers, thank you for reading this book. It is my express hope that it may spark something valuable for you.

To all my clients, thank you for the privilege of sharing a portion of your inspiring life journeys with me, and for being the great human beings that you are. Your enthusiasm, input and support around this work is so appreciated.

To the research participants who were willing to bless this work with their time, encouragement and insights---thank you Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, Dr Vimal Iccharam, Dr Ezra Masenya, Ryan Gaines, Eugene van der Meulen, Colin Hall, Dr Michael Louis, Professor Kriben Pillay, Marijn van Tiggelen, Michael Nel, Trudy Tanner, Suzanne Ackerman-Berman, Julia Kukard, Akash Singh, Dr Dorrian Aiken, Anne Warmenhoven, Mike Boon, Mohendra Moodley, Candice Smith, Howard Lipschitz, Steve Carver, Peter Lamplough, Vuyo Henda, Shashirekha Mundhra, Andre Pottas, and Bruce van Dongen. This work is a tapestry enriched by the collective infusion of your wisdom.

To Jane Harley of Boutique Books, thank you for your swift, efficient and invaluable assistance.

To Eugene van der Meulen and Madhav Michael Templar, for your wonderful encouragement along the way with this book, and most of all, for being such good friends.

To others who have contributed in various ways, including Dirk Cloete, Ashveer Mahabeer, Megan Bartlett, Swami Vimokshananda, Brett Nagle, Professor Kurt April, Kish & Surita Vithal, and the KZN African Women Chartered Accountants (AWCA) Executive: Nonku Shezi, Thabang Redman and Nirakasha Sookraj – I am deeply appreciative to you all for your support, assistance and encouragement given in various ways.

To my parents Roshan and Smita Maharaj, grandmother Susheela and aunts Shamin, Roshini and Rajini Maharaj, thank you for your unwavering love, support and assistance.

And to the great saints and sages across Time who continue to inspire me throughout my life, I am forever indebted.

Nerisha Maharaj, February 2016

Where is heaven? You ask me, my child – the sages tell us it is beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day and night; it is not of this earth.

But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust. Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet body, my child, in your palpitating heart.

The sea is beating its drums in joy, the flowers are a-tiptoe to kiss you. For heaven is born in you, in the arms of the mother-dust.

~Rabindranath Tagore~

Contents

INTRODUCTION: What sparked it

Chapter 1 The greatness of the self-love journey

The highest expression of who we are

Love, evolution and relevance to leadership

Chapter 2 The meaning of love and self-love

Love as defined through the ages

Self-love in relation to love

Debunking the myths: What self-love is not

Chapter 3 Why self-love is rare

Misperceptions and poor understanding of self-love

Societal influences

Misapplication of religion

Schooling system

Parenting

Chapter 4 The impact of self-love on leadership and organisations

How a deficiency of self-love manifests in leadership

How an abundance of self-love manifests in leadership

Chapter 5 The Five Constructs of Self-Love

Chapter 6 Self-Knowledge

The body dimension

Shifting identity beyond the body

The mind dimension

Shifting identity beyond the mind

The soul dimension

Knowing our true Self

Chapter 7 Self-Acceptance

Acceptance of both light and shadow aspects in self

Letting go of unconstructive self-criticism

Forgiveness of self and others

Chapter 8 Self-Being

Being and Becoming

Chapter 9 Self-Transcendence

Rising above the ego

Appreciating interdependence

Chapter 10 Self-Renewal

Physical renewal

Emotional renewal

Mental renewal

Spiritual renewal

Self-Love and self-love

Chapter 11 Coaching Self-Love: Practices and Reflections.

Self-Knowledge

Self-Acceptance

Self-Being

Self-Transcendence

Self-Renewal

Chapter 12 Conclusion

Notes

About the Author

Introduction: What sparked it

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

It was a strange topic for an MBA research dissertation and seemed especially eccentric coming from a chartered accountant who was, at the time, firmly grounded in the corporate world. Shouldn’t I have been researching how to do business in Africa and China instead, I wondered? But no, it was this topic, born from years of reflection, that excited me. Some things are born from deep within our knowing, opening us up to new insights about ourselves and the world around us. My exposure to a myriad of senior leaders across intellectual, cultural, professional, emotional and spiritual realms had evoked a deep-seated curiosity. What differentiated leaders as human beings and what gave rise to their ability to inspire themselves and others toward greatness? What made some people more content than others, despite their external circumstances?

I had spent more than a decade in the corporate world, holding various financial management roles in London, New York and Botswana for multinational companies and travelling all around the world. Fascinated by human nature and leadership, I attended company townhalls, less for the financial updates and more for the chance to study the way different CEOs communicated and strategised, and their impact on employees. Due to a leadership change and my role at the time as the executive strategic assistant to the CEO, I was afforded a marvellous opportunity to work with, and shadow, a succession of two very different CEOs. It afforded me first hand observation of the various boardroom interactions, leadership behaviours in and out of Board meetings and the impact of a change in leadership style on company culture, financial performance and employee productivity.

With an office in the Board area adjacent to the CEO’s, executives would often pop in on their way to meetings to share their stories, hopes, dreams and complaints. People had a way of sharing their souls with me, which I loved. What struck me was how deeply unhappy many senior leaders were. Having chased Board positions for most of their lives, there they were, goal-attained and unhappy with themselves. Not all of them, but the majority of them. Every now and again, however, a rare soul would appear who seemed to be genuinely happy with who he or she was and their life choices. It was interesting to watch the impact that their inner contentment had on their leadership style. They seemed to genuinely care about their people as human beings, not just as employees. People working for such leaders would often go the extra mile for them, lovingly reminiscing about them for years after their departures. Such leaders also seemed to enjoy their work. Their happiness did not appear to depend on something outside of themselves. It seemed to come from inside. I discovered that this quality extended beyond leaders in the corporate world to just about everybody, from store assistants to housewives. After pondering this for many years, one day the answer very clearly revealed itself to me. It popped into my mind out of the blue and it seemed to make perfect sense – but it was not an answer that I accepted easily.

Self-love. Really, I wondered? But we had always been told that the problems in the world have been caused by leaders who loved themselves too much. Furthermore, many of us were raised to believe that to love yourself was a very bad thing, a sin even. So self-love was a term that created feelings of aversion. It was only when I surrendered my judgements to sit with it objectively, conducting a conscious exploration as a researcher, that it then dawned on me how powerful and misunderstood this concept is. As I unravelled self-love, it evolved into Self-Love – a concept akin to self-realisation in its purest sense. I watched the way in which this understanding of Self-Love started to transform my own life and leadership. I have also since then had the privilege of watching it transform the lives of others. This is a book about both self-love and Self-Love. The evolution of the concept will become clearer as the book unfolds.

And so my curiosity around this concept took flight. How did it affect leaders? I wondered. Was it even relevant and acceptable as a leadership concept? And did it equate to narcissism? The thought of researching this topic filled me with both great excitement and much trepidation because it was so unexplored and misunderstood. Which senior leader would ever allow me to interview them on self-love, I wondered. How on earth would they take me seriously? And would the MBA research committee even allow me to take on such a topic?

Feeling slightly apprehensive at how ridiculous it might sound, I broached the topic with my supervisor and leadership professor, Kurt April. He approved my research proposal, saying that in his experience with leadership research and consulting around the world, many leaders lacked self-love and that it could add value. He cautioned me that it was an unprecedented topic and would therefore be tough to tackle. He later confessed that he struggled with it too, driven to become an over-achiever through a relentless desire to prove his worth, albeit to the detriment of his health and contentment. He said, "Nerisha, in short it was dysfunctional," observing that this sort of need to prove my self-worth motive lay within many of the leaders whom he had encountered in his work.

I had quite a task on my hands – because there was no academic research on self-love to be found anywhere in the world. I had to start from scratch. It is oddly appropriate and poignant that such a research topic would arise from a South African. In addition to the inherent insecurities that so many of us face, I was born and raised under apartheid. These laws institutionalised and promoted collective self-hate to the extreme, using skin colour as the basis for determining the worthiness of a human being. So I understood what low self-love could be like at a macro-level and the devastating impact of that on a nation for decades to come.

Topics like self-love and vulnerability are so often linked to women, but what was interesting to me was that every single male leader who was interviewed felt that self-love was a highly relevant concept to leadership. For many leaders, self-love had been a life-long journey and something that they all struggled with. We will see this in their stories and perspectives, which I am deeply appreciative to them for sharing.

The greatest risk and promise in this book sits in its topic. Self-love is a term that tends to evoke great wariness. It is a book that many leaders might be reluctant to pick up, deterred by the title and embarrassed to be seen clutching such a book, while struggling with private vagaries of self-love under the sad thought that he or she is alone in what is probably the most shared struggle within each human being. The challenge lies in removing the shroud of misunderstanding, guilt and shame that the term self-love elicits.

It is a subject that is fraught with great danger, because it could be so horribly misunderstood for narcissism and selfishness, thereby perpetuating the very qualities we seek to explore a freedom from. In writing this book, I was encouraged to avoid the term self-love altogether and use substitutions like ‘self-mastery’ or ‘self-esteem’ instead. But illuminating a mountain does not involve lighting a spark in the depths of just one cave in the mountain. It involves bathing the entire mountain in light, lit from the base of its foundation.

At the start of my research, I thought that the high-profile business leaders that I would be interviewing would mock the topic. Not one did. In fact, the response was quite the opposite. They all felt, despite a few reservations about the social acceptability of the term, that self-love was fundamental to effective and sustainable leadership, and that a lack of self-love correlated with dysfunctional leadership. "Ah, but many leaders actually suffer from an excess of self-love," many of us might observe. Not so. We find that self-love is often used interchangeably with the terms narcissism and selfishness, which creates confusion and is the reason why the concept of self-love is often cloaked in guilt and shame. Self-love does not equate to narcissism, as this book will seek to clarify. Humans mostly do not know what self-love really means or how to nurture it. As one leader said to me:Where do we ever learn it? Who teaches it to us?

Dr Michael Louis, Chairman of Louis Group Hotels, said when I interviewed him a few years ago:

I think you’ve touched on something that’s quite a bit more serious than you realise. I wish that someone could have told me twenty years ago that something like this exists. I would have loved business leaders or inspiring entrepreneurs or MBA graduates to have said, Listen, here’s something that’s really important. I think it’s one of the most essential things that needs to be discovered in business, I really do.

Professor Kurt April, on grading my research report, wrote:

This is an important research topic for academia, employers, coaches and counsellors – it is hoped that it highlights, for established and emerging leaders, the critical role which self-love can play in their overall well-being and ultimate performance (at work, at home, socially, and so forth)… The student has clearly shed new light on an under-researched topic, but one which is of high relevance for leaders and scholars of leadership. The list of potential future research topics provided by the researcher are exhaustive, but does demonstrate the need for academics, coaches and people management practitioners to seek further insight into this most important topic.

The research, which gave rise to The Constructs of Self-Love, has had some success. Following the completion of the report, I wrote an article on the subject which was co-submitted with Professor Kurt April. This was published in a European academic, peer-reviewed journal, and won a publication award from the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.¹

I then wrote a paper entitled Self-Love: Tapping the Heart of Employee Engagement which was presented at a global conference on managing millennial intergenerational challenges hosted by Ashridge Business School in the UK. The Constructs of Self-Love is currently being taught on the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business MBA leadership course. I am happy that the fruit of this work is being shared.

Research is published and taught around the world every day, so there is nothing too extraordinary about this. What is extraordinary and heartening is that this work, which might previously have been considered ‘airy fairy’ in the business context, is being given airtime in reputable academic spaces. I share the outcomes of the work with you simply to invoke a curiosity and motivation to read the whole book, because what you might find may be unexpected.

Like the pervasive nature of its subject, the book is boundless and comprises an abundant tapestry of academic theory, research, real life stories and insights, poetry, philosophy, psychology, spiritual wisdom and rational intellectual examination gathered over five years. To explore self-love properly I will examine what is meant by Self, and what is meant by Love. The book will also delve into what is meant by narcissism and selfishness, and all that self-love is not. Self-love is then deconstructed into the Five Constructs of Self-Love – a detailed map to help us uncover the blocks and enablers in our ability to lead ourselves and others successfully.

The observations on the impact of self-love on leadership are from leaders running large organisations, not theorists. Countless hours were spent painstakingly directly transcribing each interview. These observations are so wonderfully rich with wisdom that I have chosen to share them with you as they are. Therefore you will find the book peppered with many direct quotes. The book also contains a few practical, proven and authentic coaching techniques from my work, illustrating how we can open up to healthier levels of authentic self-love.

How did this subject contribute toward changing my life? Author Anais Nin wrote with great profundity, We see the world as we are; not as it is, which meant that at some point it dawned on me that not only was I observing self-love as an issue in the world around me but that it was my own lack of self-love that had attuned me so acutely to this. It was both a terrible and liberating realisation. As I progressed with the research, my own sense of self-love and Self-Love started to flourish. It saw me step off the corporate ladder to live in congruence with my soul, following a calling amidst significant challenges, tremendous sacrifice and great uncertainty. Spending time in contemplation along the banks of the sacred Ganges River in the ancient happy Himalayan foothills of Rishikesh contributed to reawakening a simplicity and clarity in my being. Since that time, almost half a decade ago, I have worked with people from all walks of life to unlock their highest potential and happiness through discovering and loving their true Selves. It has been a joyful and soul-rewarding change from being a strategy and finance executive in the corporate world, but I am still very much on a journey with a lot to learn.

While a fulfilling vocation can allow for the expression of Self-Love, it by no means implies mastery of it. It is worth mentioning that the external change in my vocation did not create the internal change in my being. It was the other way around. This is important because I often encounter people who say to me: "If only I could do what you did and leave my job to do something else, then I would be happy". My personal experience was that of finding peace and contentment within myself first, from where I was in the corporate world. Only when I got to that space did I turn the page to my next life chapter – a path that was meant for me. The inner work of self-love and